Bitcoin Fights Back; Could Grow Japan’s GDP

After suffering another drop during the last weekend of 2017, the price of Bitcoin has been picking up steam and growing back towards last week’s price point, possibly marking the end of the holiday sell-off. The trading market is predominantly bullish, at this time, but if last week has showed us anything is that trends can change quickly in Bitcoin’s trading scene.

According to new reports, one of the main reasons for this trend shift seems to be a report from the Wall Street Journal that uncovered a new monster investment in Bitcoin from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Namely, Thiel, an early Facebook investor and well-known entrepreneur, was reported to have made a $15-20 million investment in Bitcoin through his venture capital firm Founders Fund which is now estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of $USD.

The investment, according to the report, has been spread over several recent funds of the firm, including a fund that only started investing in the middle of 2017. There are no details as to whether any of the investments were sold but judging from previous reports of such monster investments Thiel’s firm is likely still holding on to the coins.

Bitcoin Market Turns Bullish

Since our last update, the price of Bitcoin suffered another correction that took the value down to a weekly low of $12,397.60 on Saturday afternoon, only to start recovering and reach $15,559.00 this early morning.

Driving the price up was a boost in trading volume, which remained between $12-14 billion for most of the weekend before climbing upwards with the price as of Tuesday. Currently, the volume sits at $17 billion, the market cap is at $259 billion, and the price is stabilizing near the $15,000 range.

Our technical analysis shows that traders are once again in a buying mood, with 8 out of 12 oscillators and 11 out of 12 moving averages sending a buying signal. The SMA 100 is still over the SMA 200 on this time-frame, showing that the rally is less likely to reverse. However, Williams, Stochastic, and RSI have already gone north into overbought territory, hinting that bulls might be getting tired.

If buyers keep pushing and the price moves over $16.5K we could see more bulls arrive at the market. But if the market turns bearish, we are looking at another correction towards the $13K support.

Japan’s GDP Could Grow Thanks to Bitcoin

In other interesting news, a CNBC news update details Bitcoin’s potential for growing Japan’s GDP, as described in a Friday report by Yoshiyuki Suimon and Kazuki Miyamoto – analysts from Nomura, a Japanese financial holding company.

According to Miyamoto and Suimon, the “wealth effect from unrealized gains on Bitcoin trading since the start of 2017” could boost consumer spending in Japan from ¥ (Yen) 23.2 billion to ¥96 billion, or $855.4 million. At the same time, they say that the rise in Bitcoin’s price during the fourth quarter of 2017, where it was mostly concentrated, could cause the “wealth effect” to materialize during the first quarter of 2018 and subsequently boost the real GDP on a yearly quarter-on-quarter basis to up to 0.3 percentage points.

Japan is still one of the biggest Bitcoin markets which for the most part of 2017 accounted for nearly 50% of the total trading volume. According to the report, if the Japanese are holding around 3.7 million Bitcoins, the estimated gains in price between the second and fourth quarter of the year ($7,716) make the unrealized gains on Bitcoin held by Japanese people to be at $28.5 billion.